Interviews Conducted by Kathy - Experimental Television Center

EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION

EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION CENTER Video History: Making Connections Conference (October 16-18, 1998) InterviewsConductedbyKathy High - 4 - FUNG: This conference has been really interesting for me, attending this session led by Deirdre Boyle, because it’s raised a lot of questions in my own mind around different kinds of overlapping communities and how they worked. I went to art school, but I achie—… Quite— relatively recently in my career, I’ve sort of started using the term artist to describe myself. I always thought of myself as a kind of video activist, or some other kind of thing, right? And you know, I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’m completely— I haven’t teased it all out yet, to be able to make, like, the definitive statement. Like, the past is still continuous, in terms of that process. But when I was at the community station, we worked with a number of different groups. And one of them I remember was an artists group, where A/Space had gotten money to have artists work with the community channel, and have that work projected— I mean cablecast. And we also worked with— I remember Vera Frenkel, who’s an important Canadian video artist also worked at the station. So I was exposed to people doing that kind of work, although at that time, I didn’t see myself really as part of that community. I knew people like Lisa Steelee. And in fact, one of the tapes, one of the first tapes I remember was documenting an event where there were performance artists and video artists working on a… It was one of the— a huge event in Toronto, where the Body Politic, which was a gay and lesbian magazine, had been charged with pedophilia. I mean, printing an article on pedophilia was a huge anti-censorship campaign. It was quite an event, where artists, activists, and all different kinds of people came together. And so I knew these people.

EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION CENTER Video History: Making Connections Conference (October 16-18, 1998) InterviewsConductedbyKathy High - 5 - FUNG (Cont.): Then, after three years, I kind of got disillusioned with where cable access was going; it seemed to be moving more in a corporate direction. And I gave up, went to South America for a year, almost, and then came back and went into academia. At that point, John Grayson(sp?), who… HIGH: What year was this? FUNG: That was 1980. ’Cause we went to Nicaragua, down south(?), the end of the year. And then I came back and went to school and studied film theory and film history. And I was gonna go into this academic field. I was— wanted to go to NYU and do a Ph.D. in film studies. And then John Grayson, who had been living in the States, working at AIVF, came back to Toronto and said, “You cannot become a theorist, you have to be an artist; and I will make you an artist. I have a camcorder, and I’ll shoot anything you want.” And so that’s how I ended up making a first independent tape. I had been one of the founders of the Asian Gay Lesbian Movement in the country, and I decided to do this tape where we would do a kind of consciousness raising tool. And so John and I sort of pieced this thing together. Well, he shot and I directed and edited it. And then it came out. And I didn’t expect anything to happen with it. But then it got picked up at the Grayson Seminars, which is a documentary seminar. And then Linda Blackaby picked it up and programmed it at Flaherty. And then all of a sudden I was a video artist. (laughs) That’s how I became a video artist.